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IJCP May 2018
An interesting new issue of IJCP about the future and present state of comparative psychology. All articles can be freely downloaded here, and I encourage people to read some or all of these. They are all fairly shot and easy to read. https://escholarship.org/uc/uclapsych_ijcp Charles Abramson edited the special issue, and wrote about what he sees as the decline in comparative psychology (not necessarily comparative cognition). This paper is VERY useful as a resource, as he has compiled a large list of things ranging from textbooks to histories to teaching tools for comparative psychology. Our students should be using these lists, at minimum, to build part of the GE reading lists. Zucker talks about integrating CP into history and systems courses. DAW in particular might like to skim this one, to see if he can pick up a new trick or two. He shows a lot about historical trends in publishing in journals like JCP and JCPP. Eaton et al. wrote about the problems of "top down" approaches to comparative psychology, where one starts with the a clear construct (usually a human construct) and then look for it in animals. They argue we should do more to understand animals, and then think about what they do as it might pertain to what we do. We all agree with this, but it is a useful reminder. The problem, which they do not address, is that no one gets funded this way. No one can get 3-5 years of monkey to just study and animal, and then figure out what that might mean about humans. So, we have to find a way to do both - be aware of bottom up value, but also still fund labs by taking town down approaches to studies. There is a very good section on "all or none" cognition that I recommend people read and think about. A very interesting perspective in this paper is that identical methodologies across species does not make the research "good" comparative work. In fact, they argue this is the wrong approach, and is shortsighted about what comparability means in testing across species (at least in some cases). In contrast, our own Mackenzie Smith, Julia Watzek, and Sarah Brosnan argue that this exactly what we should try to do in their article, although they do a very nice job of discussing how to procedurally make sure this is done well. For example, with what they call "back testing" an animal paradigm with humans, to see if humans do what they should, given that the test is usually about some human-evident capacity (such as cooperation). So, these two articles go very nicely together, and are ones all of you should read. Ed Wasserman wrote another very nice article about whether animals have minds (and, a little about artificial intelligence!), and summarizes his take on some of the most compelling instances of "minding" in animals. He also gives a nice, short overview of those who thought a lot about this well before there was a comparative psychology. Tom Zentall also wrote a similar article, although more empirically focused on work from his lab on gambling, sunk costs, etc. But he also talks about what he sees as good examples of cognitive abilities in animals, and so this is work a skim. And, finally, I talked about the role of replication and pre-registration in comparative psychology, and how we could do more of that, and do it well.